Real Communion

I want to begin this morning by showing you a picture of Heylipol church, which is the only remaining church building on the island of Tiree, where my friend Elspeth MacLean is the minister.

There used to be another building at Kirkapol but after lots of soul searching, the congregation decided to sell it and use the proceeds to maintain and upgrade the church at Heylipol, and we were pleased to see the beginnings of that work when we were over in July.

Heylipol would have been able to seat 300 in its day, but given that Tiree’s population is only 600, and there’s now a Baptist congregation on the island, and most folk don’t go to church, it’s pretty clear that the majority of those pews aren’t going to be filled any time soon.

So again, after much discussion, they’ve removed a good number of the pews at the rear of the church to open up a welcoming space where children can be looked after and taught during the service and teas and coffees can be served afterwards, because they don’t have any other space of that kind.

A sensible solution to an obvious problem you’d think. But oh, the angst over those pews. Mostly from folk who rarely darkened the door of the Kirk at all, and are adamant that they won’t be back now because of what’s been done.

Funny how we think idolatry’s a thing of the past; but remember than an idol’s just something that’s become more important to us than God himself.

If you’re leaving the church over the sake of a long, wooden, not especially comfortable bench, it strikes me that that bench might have become just a little bit too important to you.

But I digress…

What the congregation have done, in removing those pews, is open up a space where those in the church, and beyond, can experience community over food and conversation, and not just on Sundays.

They’ve made a statement that church isn’t just about the vertical dimension of faith that you’ve heard me talk about on many occasions – me, the minister and God. It’s about the horizontal dimension too – the people around us as we gather for worship; the people we go back to as we return to our daily lives. We need both dimensions for a rounded discipleship.

And the folk in Tiree are making an architectural statement about the importance of face to face community, that horizontal dimension, in an era where our communal life is getting eroded away like never before.

And there are a host of reasons why that’s happening.

Think of the social changes in our community in your lifetime.

It used to take a handful of men to work a good sized farm; now with mechanisation one or two can manage the same amount of land. Farming’s a far less communal experience than it used to be.

People tell me that years ago there was a better community spirit in the villages in our parish. Mums would run clubs for kids during the summer and hundreds of wee ones would pitch up. But those were the days when most women didn’t work outside the home, and there was more time to invest in family and neighbourhood things. There was more cohesiveness.

A century ago, a parish used to be the place you lived and worked and played and worshipped. For good and for ill, you knew everybody. Today, for many folk, home is just the place where you sleep. You work and shop and socialise elsewhere. We don’t really know our neighbours in the ways that we used to.

And I’m no Luddite, but I’m pretty sure that technology’s part of the problem. The many different screens we live with these days are great, but do they tend to take us into ourselves.  Even watching TV is less and less a communal experience. Instead of watching the same thing together your average family’s much more likely to be found watching 4 different things on 4 different devices in 4 different rooms.

And I’m not bemoaning these changes, I’m just using them to illustrate that in the modern world, having a life with and for others is harder than it used to be. The circumstances aren’t kind.

And yet the desire within us to know and be known is still there, and it’s still strong.

I’ve been married to a GP for long enough to know that a good proportion of the folk who come through her door don’t need medicines at all. They just need someone who’ll listen to their problems with compassion and show them some solidarity.

Survey after survey tells us that good friendships, even one or two, make for a happier life. We might have 300 virtual friends on Facebook, but we still need a handful of folk in real life we can see regularly and genuinely be ourselves with.

We’re hard-wired for relationships.

And that shouldn’t surprise us because that’s how God is wired, and as the early chapters of Genesis remind us, we are made in God’s image.

In late July Katie Waltar and I headed down to Edinburgh for a conference called the Abbey Summer School and the subject they were looking at was the Trinity. God existing, somehow, as three persons and yet one God.

And some find that doctrine an embarrassment. They feel it’d be much easier to downplay the Trinity so we can have better and clearer dialogue with our monotheistic brothers and sisters in Islam and Judaism.

But if we lose the Trinity, we lose one of the most precious things we can say about God. That God exists, primarily, as persons in relationship.

We talk of God as Creator, or Almighty, and we’re right to do so, but they are not the first word on who God is.  Before God created anything, or exercised power over anything, God was Father. God was Son, God was Spirit. Persons in relationship.

Not a static, isolated deity, but a dance of persons; a dynamic exchange of divine love.

We often talk about God being love in our tradition – but that wouldn’t be possible if God, before creation, were a lonely singularity with nothing or no-one to set his love upon.

The truth isn’t just that God loves – it’s that God IS love. In and of himself. In the interplay of Father, Son and Spirit.

And creation is the overflow of that love into space and time and ultimately into other persons who can share and reflect his love to one another in community.

And so, as the story goes, Adam was formed and breathed on – the pinnacle of God’s creation. And what does God say next? He says “It is not good for the man to be alone”. From the outset, we needed community. Communion with God, communion with one another. It’s how we’re wired.

We only come to know who we are as we engage with and stay open to the other.

Think of the network of relationships that sustained you in early life and helped you grow into the person you now are. Family, friends, neighbours, teachers, colleagues and mentors. We need each other.

And when Jesus, the second Adam, came into the world – God incarnate – was he any different? Was he so self-sufficient he didn’t need anyone?

No. He too needed and desired community. A family to nurture him as a child; friends and companions as an adult.

So much of his life lived in company: travelling, eating, talking, learning. Making a point of always staying open to the other and speaking with them, even if he profoundly disagreed with them.

Taking time in the company of his Father, but then plunging back in to life among the people. Life lived in community.

God is relational. We see that in the Trinity, and we see it in the life of Jesus. And we too are relational. John Donne was right to state that man is an island. We were made in such a way that we need each other.

And this is what Paul is telling the church in Corinth in the passage Malcolm read to us earlier. Yes, there are different gifts in the church, says Paul (As a wee aside - I’ve always enjoyed the fact that he places those who teach above those who work miracles!). But there are different gifts and we need each other for the body to function well.

All of you are Christ’s body, he says. Each one has a part in it.

And that’s a key thing in church life. In community everybody has something to learn and something to bring. Everybody.

You may not have deep Bible knowledge, but you have life experience. That’s what you bring. You might not know Greek, but you can bake a mean lasagne. That’s what you bring. You might be tone deaf, but you care about justice. That’s what you bring.

Everyone has something to bring, and also something to learn.

Are you humble enough to admit that you haven’t got life and faith sussed all the time? That there are things that confuse you or anger you or hurt you or utterly defeat you at times?

Are you willing to learn from the person who might be just one step ahead of you on the same journey, or are you too proud to ask? Or do you think you already have all the answers and can afford the luxury of a closed mind?

Everybody has something to learn and something to bring. We need each other. It’s not good for us to be alone.

But if it’s not good for us to be alone, nor is it easy for us to be together, sometimes.

The Apostle Paul knows this.

And that’s why he follows his discussion of the body and gifts with this famous discourse on the imperative of love.

And although this reading’s often used at weddings, it’s not primarily about marriage. It’s about living life alongside other human beings, whatever the context.

To get along with each other we have to exercise patience and kindness. We’ll have to curb our jealousy, our selfishness, our irritability. We’ll have to tear up or burn our record of wrongs.

Community is the place where we learn to love when it’s not easy and it doesn’t come naturally.

We’re given to one another in community for our maturation as people.

And that’s why we need to keep meeting together.

My friend Matt jokes that with individualism rampant in the States, pretty soon everyone will opt out of church and they’ll just stay home with a good cappuccino and their favourite preacher on MP3.

Now I’m all for good coffee; but that approach to faith is missing the point.

Each of us has something to learn and something to bring to the community that we call the church and we won’t learn it from our armchairs. And nor will we grow and mature in our ability to love one another if we always keep the other at arm’s length.

We need each other.

Covered a lot of ground –

Seen that as human beings have a deep desire for community, and we need it to help us grow.

Community reflects the character of God who is three and yet one.

Acknowledged that it’s not good to be alone, but nor is it easy to be together.

Each of us has something to learn and something to bring to the community we call the church,

being part of that family will require us to act in love, even when it’s not easy.

Some questions to reflect on.

How’s your home life? How are your relationships?

Are you getting what you need to get, are you giving what you need to give in those situations?

Are you really in communion with the people you share your life and your home with? Very often it’s those folk we’re most likely to take for granted. If not, what steps can you take to improve things?

And here in church – are we a real community; or are we more like an aggregate of individuals – sharing the same space week by week, but not much else?

How can we be more open to the other, be they longstanding member we just don’t know, or the stranger who’s here for the first time? How can we be the ones who take the initiative?

And lastly - Are you plugged in? Plugged into God, first and foremost? Responding to his call to faith and friendship? And then plugged into the church – bringing whatever it is you can bring, and learning whatever it is you need to learn.

We were made for real communion with God and with one another, and our hearts won’t let us rest until we find it.

Friday 15^th July was the first night of the Tiree music Festival. And it was an utter washout. There was so much rain that the campsite had to be abandoned, and the 600 Islanders went out of their way to put up the 1000 campers who’d come over from the mainland for the fun.

40 of them were hosted in the church at Heylipol. And guess where they slept? In that new space created by the removal of those pews. And when I saw her a few weeks later, Elspeth was full of stories of conversations, laughter and even some tears from that night as she and her folk looked after the campers and then just sat and talked with them.

An impromptu community, thrown together by the elements became a place where God was seen to be at work in the kindness of his people.

And it couldn’t have happened, unless both the building and the people were open.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.